Every year, there are countless photocopier models that are released at a wide range of price points, focused on every type of business, large and small.
From the humble yet vital office copy machine to overachieving home equipment and large-scale scanners and printers designed for near-constant use, photocopiers vary considerably in size, scale and the wide breadth of features we have.
However, the question we often get asked by businesses is whether the purpose of adding new features and functionality to a multi-function printer has a tangible benefit for businesses; why add new features to a photocopier when the vast majority of businesses stick to scanning, printing and photocopying?
Part of the reason is the fact that many new photocopiers are designed to print more effectively, requiring less toner powder for laser printing, whilst the other part is that many people actually do use far more of their photocopier’s features than you might expect.
To illustrate this, here are five features that are either new or have only recently become widespread in general photocopying that many people rely upon, to showcase why a new printer deployed correctly can help your workflow.
Can Photocopiers Make Booklets For You?
One of the biggest contributions photocopiers made to culture is their ability to easily and cheaply reproduce documents. This was famously what underground comic artists such as Matt Groening and zine publishers would use to produce limited runs of specialist media without major backing.
However, the process for doing so was more complex than it is today, typically requiring each page to be printed individually and the results sorted manually to produce the completed booklet, during which time pages can end up in the wrong order or upside down.
Photocopiers progressively made this easier by allowing multiple pages to be photocopied at once, then duplex (double-sided printing), then creating collation systems to put documents in the right order automatically, before finally having hole punch and automatic stapler capability.
The most recent addition is the ability to create booklets, using a combination of A3 printing, collation and middle-page stapling that allows for instruction booklets and manuals to be created easily and affordably.
Can Photocopiers Fold Documents For You?
One of the most difficult tasks of creating high-quality marketing materials in your office without the help of a print studio is folding documents, which is somewhat remarkable given that it is a task that feels almost automatic.
Folding paper is difficult to do consistently, gets quite tedious when folding hundreds or thousands of flyers at once and can significantly slow down your marketing campaign.
The best solution to this? Get a photocopier which can fold flyers exactly the way you want them to look, giving you consistent results every time.
Can Photocopiers Track Printing Patterns?
With so many consumables to focus on, there is a tangible, calculatable cost for each page you print, and so having analytics to track how extensively different parts of your business are using their printer is essential for finding efficiency gains.
This does not necessarily have to go as far as a paperless office, but instead ensures that paper is not wasted, finding employees and teams who have unexpectedly high paper usage and liaising with them to find efficient uses of resources.
This would only be possible with print servers that can track printing patterns, determine your daily, monthly and yearly printing costs and allow you to flag alerts if there are unexpected spikes in usage or costs.
Can You Print Documents From Your Work Mobile?
The biggest game changer for office printers was the development of the print server, a system that manages printer requests across the office, queues them up and ensures a printer is not overwhelmed with tasks it cannot complete immediately.
An extra benefit of modern print servers is that they allow documents to be printed remotely, including from a laptop away from the office or even from a mobile device.
This can be extremely helpful if a document is complete and just needs printing out, but there is nobody with the capacity to print it out themselves, particularly at the end of the day.
Can You Scan Editable PDF Documents?
Scanning documents to make PDFs is a critical part of document management and digital archives, particularly since many documents must be stored both as a hard copy and as a digital document.
However, a problem with scanning documents is that many earlier systems scanned them as image files, meaning that the text cannot be copied or interacted with directly.
This has changed with the development of more advanced optical character recognition (OCR) that can read a document being scanned and convert it into text that a computer can read.